REVIEW - Another Earth

Yes, another planet, an exact mirror image of our Earth, appears in our Universe. 

On the same night that it appears, a car accident takes the life of a composer's wife. Instead of focusing on what everyone does about the existence of this duplicate Earth, the movie covers in depth the guilt felt by the woman driving the other car; how she spends the next few years in jail for causing the accident, then the year after getting out of jail cleaning the composer's house and getting "involved" with him, all without him knowing who she really is.

Full marks for a story that manages to cover a huge science fiction topic without a shred of science.

An intensely miserable film, which left me feeling that the other Earth was just an arty farty light against which to hold a sad tale about guilt and grief.

An ending that could spark hours of interesting debate doesn't really save this from being too slow, and a bit dull.

RANT - How to stay healthy

Saw this posted somewhere today. Sorry for the lack of clarity, but the location isn't as important as the message.

Gillian McKeith is an old whiner, like many holier-than-thou organic trumpet blowers.

Nigella Lawson may not be the skinniest chef I've seen, but she carries it very well.

I don't need to add anything to the message, do I?

REVIEW - One Hundred Mornings

Fashioned after The Road, but not as dramatic, or well made.

After a "break down in society" whatever that is, 2 couples try to survive / live it out in a remote-ish cabin in Ireland. I say "whatever that is" because people still show up from time to time in vehicles, so it's not the aftermath of a nuclear winter depicted in The Road.

This appears to be a no TV, no electricity, no schools kind of break down in society, where people mostly keep to themselves (which is what they always do in rural Ireland, surely), and wait for news from the "outside world".

Desperate measures are signaled when one of the guys uses the last squirt from their last ketchup bottle.

But it's mostly about them being bored, and unfortunately that rubs off on the audience.

REVIEW - J. Edgar

A solid, well-made, presumably accurate story of the career of J. Edgar Hoover.  The trouble was, that's all it was.

Maybe we shouldn't expect anything different from a story that's been told many times before. But with nothing other than detail - no particular political, sexual, or overly critical angles to pursue, Clint Eastwood's direction fell short of even being an Oliver Stone-like expose of Hoover.

All of the main protagonists are represented (Hoover's original mentor, his long-term secretary, and his second-in-comannd, and likely wannabe gay lover), and every expected avenue was explored.

Pavey thought it unfairly focused only on Hoover's negatives, but I've never seen or read another story on the man that does not cover those same negatives. I'm prepared to believe he was fragile, vindictive, obsessive, as well as a national hero.

So, see it, but aside from Di Caprio's monumental performance, don't expect to be blown away by it.

RANT - Man on the Train

What is billed as a "Crime movie" starts out so slow it may lose you in the first 15 minutes - hell, it runs at a snail's pace throughout, so there's hardly anything to get into at all.

The man who arrives by train into a small town hooks up separately with two people - the first is an old professor (Donald Sutherland) who welcomes the traveler into his home; the second is an Eastern European crook planning to rob the local bank with the train traveler.

What's clear by the end of the movie is that the professor and the criminal from the train long to be in the other man's place, and that I'd rather be somewhere else than watching this.

REVIEW - Chez Spencer

Having said I don't usually review breakfast spaces, today's brunch at Chez Spencer was special (and therefore review-worthy) for a number of reasons: 

1. We were celebrating Jen and Sue's recent wedding 

2. er, that's reason enough

Chez Spencer is an all-too-easy-to-miss establishment in The Mission, and a top-notch location for dinner. Only lately (I think) have they started opening for brunch, and even if it's not a recent development, this is the first time we've eaten anything other than dinner there.

Despite Chez Spencer's usual dinner top-notch-ness, their brunch is probably a little too fancy for pure relaxation.

For example:

Omelette aux fines herbes

Foie Gras Au Torchon

Wild mushroom tartine with poached egg

Cauliflower veloute with parmesan crisp

Filet mignon with morels a la creme & truffle butter

Together with the champagne, Sazerac, and martini cocktails, our dining choices sounded fabulous, but somehow ended up just OK. There wasn't much to fault in the food - perhaps we were all in a corned beef hash mood.

Thank heaven the get-together was more than just about the food.

RAVE - Plow

Plow is normally open for breakfast and lunch, and does an outstanding job of that. But I don't bother to RAVE or RANT about breakfast joints. However, last night we joined Gareth, Katie, and 20 others for one of Plow's monthly dinner parties.

Plow's owners also own Ruby Wine, just a few doors along 18th Street on Potrero Hill, and this allows them to pair wonderful organic food with equally wonderful wines.

The highlights of the night were the Short Ribs, paired with a Syrah from a challenging location on the Northern California coast. The other courses - crudites, salad, and apple pie - were good if not world-beating, but the Short Ribs + Syrah + company made the evening fly by.

Plow is an excellent place for breakfast and brunch, often ruined by the crowds that line up outside on the weekends; nowhere is worth queuing for an hour, especially when there are a handful of other great places within a few minutes' walk. Plow doesn't accept reservations, so your best bet is to drive there, and keep driving past if there's a line outside. Try Serpentine, or Axis Cafe in these cases.

RAVE - A Lonely Place to Die

5 adventurers in Scotland discover what they think is a Croatian girl left abandoned in a hole in the ground.

Like a number of recent British films, this is a horror movie with a very different pace, and none of the histrionics that come with American horror movies.

Mountaineering scenes remind me why I never want to climb any higher than the second floor in our house. The only time I've been close to real climbing - a couple hundred feet of abseiling in Scotland - stamped this sickly grimace on my face that made everyone but me laugh. Ugh. Never again!

The requisite near death experiences while climbing develop into a tense story, with twist after twist. 

While out hiking, they hear screams for help coming from underground and find a young girl who has been buried in a hole by persons unknown.

The group of 5 splits up (never a good idea, and one of the only early indicators of this being a horror movie) with the 2 best climbers heading for the fast way down off the mountain to get help, and the other 3 staying with the young girl but needing to get away from the place where she had been abandoned.

When they encounter the crew that left the girl in that hole, things (and I'm sure you've expected this) go downhill from there.

RANT - $4.3M for this?

I rarely, if ever criticize others art preferences - who's to say one person's Gainsborough is better than another's Liechtenstein? And while I may not covet one artist's "yard-square patch of grass" art installation, it's fair game for anyone else to crave it. 

However, when some dipstick pays FOUR MILLION THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS for a dull as ditchwater photo of a bit of indiscriminate water, someone needs to say "Oi! Double You Tee Eff!" And today, that "someone" is me.

Yesterday, an un-named collector stumped up $4.3m at a Christie's auction for this 1999 (yes, it's not even an old classic) photograph of 50 yards of the river Rhine.

You'd probably be hard-pushed to pay that for a freaking mansion on the banks of The Rhine, let alone this underwhelming snap of the grey river. 

The 1999 photograph by German artist Andreas Gursky. Titled "Rhein II," is a chromogenic color print face-mounted to acrylic glass.

No, even with that additional data it's not worth 4.3 dollars, let alone 4.3 million!

RAVE - Page Eight

A made-for-British-TV spy thriller now showing on Comcast On-Demand, and soon on regular TV. It's a corker.

Bill Nighy plays an all around decent bloke working as an intelligence officer within MI5, who is shown a top secret report stating the Americans are imprisoning and torturing suspected terrorists. The fact that Nighy knows who in Government has known all along about the prisons and the torture, makes him a target from his own security services, and heaven knows who else.

He's no James Bond - he drives a Saab, lives alone in a Fulham apartment, meets his contacts at Little Chef - but this develops into a gripping drama worthy of 007.

RAVE - Bistro Jeanty

We're gradually eating our way through Yountville, Napa. I shouldn't make it sound like such a chore, as Yountville probably has more fine restaurants per resident than any other town in the US. The fact that it's smack in the middle of Napa wine country makes today's escapade - buying a case of Hill Family Sauvignon Blanc and a cook-book from Bouchon, while having sunday lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant next door - an easy task.

Today's subject was Bistro Jeanty, a gorgeous little French restaurant that's sooo French you imagine they use Garlic air freshener in the restrooms.

BJ's web site allows you to download the recipe for their "world famous tomato soup". We had that soup, and it wasn't worthy of that accolade. Mostly cream, not enough tomato, there are many better examples - even Campbell's straight-from-the-can tomato soup is better. 

Anyhow, apart from the inflated view of their soup, this place is outstanding. My Petit Salé aux Lentilles (Pork belly with a lentil and foie gras ragout) was one of the best dishes I have ever tasted. Ever.

Pavey's Boeuf Bourginon, and my Cassoulet (Baked beans with duck confit, Toulouse sausage & bacon) took us over our "rich food" limit for the day, and despite their fabulousness, we couldn't finish them. 


A glass of Ricard, with ice and water, and a couple glasses of Sancerre kept us floating Francophiles for the rest of the day. 

RAVE - Wild Flag at GAMH

Seems like the ladies of Sleater-Kinney like to play at Great American Music Hall, whether they're in S-K or Wild Flag.

We've seen Sleater-Kinney a couple of times at Great American, and last night - despite Pavey's dislike for the "wailing and screaming" we saw Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss in their new band, Wild Flag, at the same venue.

I love this place; like Slims, The Independent, and Bottom of The Hill, you walk in off the street and it seems like you can immediately touch the stage. 

The sound is great, and the size means even if you're at the back, you still feel part of the action.

Wild Flag have, however, toned down their wailing and screaming, and without those essential elements they sound just a bit too mainstream-with-the-volume-way-up.

Never mind, it was much better than a night in front of the telly.

"Much better" that was, except for the dreadful support band, Drew Grow and The Pastors' Wives. We tried to arrive after they finished, but events conspired against us and we had to listen to their entire, mangled-cat sounding set.

REVIEW - Anonymous

Under normal circumstances, this deserves a RAVE - it was well-directed, beautifully-shot, and superlatively-acted (particularly by Rhys Ifans). 

But these aren't normal circumstances - Shakespeare is one of the basic pillars of education, and not just in England. 

Even though I thoroughly disliked Shakespeare when I was 12 years old, being forced to read Julius Caesar along with the class, and dragged along on school trips to see Richard III at the movies, as I grew older I realized how important these works are to our lives. 

I'll stop there, because I don't want to come across as a card-carrying, old school educationalist. 

But, to have someone attempt to tell a different tale than the one I learned at school, and a German director at that, is too much for me. It's like learning England did not win the World Cup in 1966, or that The Beatles mimed all their songs, with Milli Vanilli doing the actual singing.

Maybe I should have picked more contemporary comparisons, but you get the drift.

Roland Emmerich - the offending German director - claims that because we don't have any original scripts that can be compared with other (non-existent) examples of William Shakespeare's handwriting, we should spend 90 minutes watching some cock and bull story about Edward De Vere, Duke of Oxford, and ex-lover to Queen Elizabeth (the first two badges are real, the third only alleged) was driven into poverty in his pursuit of the ignoble art of writing plays that were indirectly ascribed to Shakespeare.

If that wasn't enough, the film portrayed the real Shakespeare as an illiterate, drunken buffoon.

All too much for me. The film's first hour was entertaining enough, but I kept nodding off during the last 30 minutes.

I think I'll spread some rumors about Johann Wolfgang Goethe's books and poems having been penned by a pig farmer in Bavaria.

RAVE - Bar Agricole

Surprisingly busy for a Tuesday night at 7.30pm - or maybe this is how SOMA hipsters spend their "school" nights? 

Anyhow, we were impressed by the design, layout, ambience and general coolness of the place. Despite it's somewhat narrow, shed-like frontage, inside it's an interesting mix of indoors and out-of-doors dining and drinking spaces, with a main restaurant divided into attractive sections, with a great mix of lighting. 

Surprisingly, even with the place being full last night, the noise level was low-ish, making it easy to converse with my hot date / wife. 

That same date / wife didn't enjoy the food as much as I did, perhaps because she's trying to get over an annoying cough, and because she didn't order a freaking appetizer! She mostly had to watch me eat the excellent country pate, and 6 equally excellent oysters, before her Cod and my Beef Brisket arrived. 

One negative from me ... that Beef Brisket came with Polenta, rather than proper, honest-to-goodness, God's-own-vegetable, Potato. I hate Polenta. It's worse than tasteless - it has an annoying half-taste that does nothing more than remind you you're not eating potato. I hate turnips, and parsnips even more, for the same reason. I'll have to refer to them collectively, as Polentic ingredients.

The cocktail list is very different from the usual Basil- or Cumin-infused stuff that's now served up everywhere in San Francisco, and we enjoyed the Presidente and the Sleepyhead. 

Having said that, the "mixologist" on duty last night worked stoner-slow, which didn't bode well for a Friday-night-with-Gareth type of session. 

Needless to say, we'll try it again to see if the duffer behind the bar has another gear besides (S)low.